Is There More to Us Than Matter?

Arguments for the Immaterial Mind

I recently had a conversation with an atheist who wondered if only the material world exists. Materialism — the view that only physical matter exists — is not a new idea. It has its origins around 600 BCE (India) and continued in the 5th century BCE (Greece). It has shaped science and modern philosophy for centuries. It reemerged in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and influenced Karl Marx's concept of "historical materialism" in the 19th century.

But can everything about the human experience be reduced to brain chemistry and quantum interactions? A variety of diverse philosophical thoughts say no. Here are several arguments showing that there may be more to reality — and to us — than matter alone.

1. The Argument from Phenomenal Consciousness

In The Conscious Mind, philosopher David Chalmers distinguishes between the “easy problems” of explaining brain function and the “hard problem” of explaining why we have inner experiences at all (Chalmers 1996, 4–6). Measuring brain waves tells us how neurons fire, but not why it feels like something to be you. As Thomas Nagel famously put it, science can describe what a bat’s brain does, but not what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974, 439). This subjective quality of awareness — called qualia — seems irreducible to physical explanation.

2. The Argument from Intentionality

Philosopher John Searle has shown that thoughts possess intentionality: they are always about something — an object, concept, or truth (Searle 1983, 27–30). No purely physical process is “about” anything; a neuron doesn’t mean or represent the Eiffel Tower, yet our thoughts clearly do. This suggests that mental content has a different ontological status from matter.

3. The Argument from Rational Insight

C. S. Lewis, in Miracles, provides an epistemological critique of naturalism, noting that reasoning depends on logical relations—not on mere physical causation (Lewis 1947, 19–21). If all our thoughts were the result of atoms colliding, there would be no guarantee that those collisions produced true beliefs rather than random associations. Alvin Plantinga later reinforced this in Warrant and Proper Function, arguing that materialism is self-defeating since it undermines confidence in human rationality (Plantinga 1993, 217–220).

4. The Argument from Doubt and Indivisibility

Rene Descartes’ famous Meditations on First Philosophy concluded that while one can doubt the body, one cannot doubt the reality of one’s own thought: cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes 1641, 17). The mind, then, exists as a distinct reality — a “thinking substance” capable of existing without matter. The mind, an unextended thinking substance, possesses properties (unity, indivisibility, incorrigibility) that are absent in matter. For Descartes, this was proof of the soul’s immaterial nature.

5. The Argument from the Unity of Consciousness

Long before Descartes, the Islamic philosopher Mulla Sadra argued that the human soul must be immaterial because consciousness unites diverse experiences into a unified, self-aware whole. A single thought can integrate vision, memory, emotion, and language — a feat no divisible material entity can claim (Nasr, History of Islamic Philosophy, 114–116).

6. The Argument from the Simplicity of Consciousness

Another Islamic philosopher, Avicenna, argued along this vein. Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment posits that self-awareness persists even in sensory deprivation, thus revealing the soul’s independence from bodily mediation (Nasr, History of Islamic Philosophy, 114–116).

7. The Mystery of Free Will

If neurochemical laws determined every human choice, freedom would be an illusion. In Four Views on Free Will, Robert Kane argues that our lived experience of genuine responsibility points toward a form of agency that cannot be fully explained by deterministic physics (Kane 2011, 43–45). Free will, like consciousness (mentioned earlier), suggests there is more to the person than atoms.

None of these arguments rejects science; instead, they extend one’s inquiry beyond the physical. Science describes the what and how of the brain; philosophy probes the why of consciousness, thought, and freedom. To claim that there may be an immaterial component to reality is not to deny material existence, but to ask what it cannot explain. Ironically, in rejecting the fact that the immaterial exists, a materialist is rationalizing, intentional about his belief, and freely choosing it – all the components that point one in the direction of there being an immaterial reality and not just a material one.

If the immaterial exists, as argued above, theories that are based on evolution is then faced with an acute difficulty. How can evolution explain the existence of the immaterial when the universe began with only the material? Atheistic philosopher, JL Mackie, said that any theory claiming that evolution or physical processes can explain how “objective” immaterial moral values affect behavior faces a deep metaphysical problem: how the immaterial could causally interact with the material.

“The hypothesis that there are objective values or obligations involves entities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. The claim that these moral qualities can somehow ‘supervene’ upon natural facts, or that evolution has equipped us to apprehend them, leaves us with the difficulty of how such immaterial entities could have any influence on the physical world.” — J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 38–42.

Christian theism answers both the existence of the immaterial and explains how it came to be. It states that the material world was created by God, who is outside of time, space, and matter, and that the immaterial aspect of humans was placed there by God Himself.

Bibliography

• Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

• Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. 2nd ed. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993.

• Kane, Robert. Four Views on Free Will. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011.

• Lewis, C. S. Miracles. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947.

• Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. London: Penguin Books, 1977, 38–42.

• Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.

• Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, ed. History of Islamic Philosophy. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2020.

• Plantinga, Alvin. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

• Searle, John R. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.